P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

“WE MOURN THE LOSS OF TODD M. BEAMER”

Can anger and holiness ever go together and co-exist? On September 11, 2001, many righteous people — born-again Christians — were livid. They experienced the fullness of holy wrath. And yes, a loving tender Father in heaven was also righteously angry, holy and angry, beyond description.

The last thing in the world I would want to do would be to invade the privacy of a young mother, but sometime last January Lisa Beamer had a third baby. Little David, 5, and Andrew, 3, had a new brother or sister. Of course, all three kids will have to grow up without a dad, because Todd was one of the brave men on United Flight 93 that was deliberately downed in a field in Pennsylvania.

Well, friend, I know without a doubt that all the Christians at Princeton Alliance Church in Plainsboro, New Jersey are going to rally around and help Lisa raise these three wonderful children. But the people at that church have got to be hurting over this loss. Todd was a Sunday school teacher there. He scheduled most of his business trips so that he could be present for weekend services. He carried not one, but two, cell phones, largely for the purpose of sharing Jesus with people and giving them encouragement. In fact, a friend of his, Brian Mumau, had a positive message of hope on his answering machine just before Todd got on the plane that fateful Tuesday morning. A big thanks, by the way, to the magazine Christianity Today for these priceless details.

The hard dilemma is this. If you have a holy heart at all, if you have any shred of righteousness whatever inside of you, then you’ve got to be angry about what happened to Todd. This is just a great, godly, terrific family . . . and now Dad is gone forever. Forever until God makes it right, of course, but this past December 25, Lisa didn’t have a husband to share the Christmas joy with. Eight months pregnant, and having to trim the tree with just those two little boys, and photos of Todd on the mantelpiece. Well, you get the idea of what I’m trying to say. Holiness and anger sometimes go together.

That’s really our topic this week: THE HOLINESS OF GOD. And there has already been volumes written, obviously, along the lines of: “Where was God when this happened? How does He feel? Is He angry?” And so on. But what can we learn about how holiness and wrath go together, or holiness and divine vengeance?

We’ve been using some excerpts from the book, The Knowledge of the Holy, by the late A. W. Tozer, and by the way, I think it’s the sweetest of serendipities that Todd and Lisa belonged to Princeton Alliance Church, which is part of the same great Christian and Missionary Alliance denomination that Tozer served so capably for some 40 years. On the church’s web site is a statement: “We mourn the loss of Todd M. Beamer.”

Anyway, Tozer does some writing on this very issue of holiness and the emotions of God. As we think about human beings deliberately steering planes into skyscrapers, and diabolically mailing anthrax germs to unsuspecting innocent people, we realize that we live in a sick and fallen world. Here’s what Tozer says:

“God is holy and He has made holiness the moral condition necessary to the health of His universe.”

We mentioned this the other day, you recall. Friend, the design of God is a healthy, happy, fulfilled, contented universe. Everything we’ve experienced lately is absolutely foreign; it’s an invasion from outside the blueprint. Holiness is a good word to describe how God wants to, and has always wanted to, protect the health of the universe He built for us. Let’s continue with the essay:

“Sin’s temporary presence in the world only accents this. Whatever is holy is healthy,” Tozer writes. “Evil is a moral sickness that must end ultimately in death.” Then he adds this interesting detail: “The formation of the language itself suggests this, the English word holy deriving from the Anglo-Saxon haling, hal, meaning, ‘well, whole.’”

So “holy” and “healthy” are absolutely intertwined together, as far as God’s plan for the universe is concerned. A Donald Nicholl once put it this way:

“Holiness is not an optional extra to the process of creation but rather the whole point of it.”

And of course, that blueprint must include the most important part of God’s creation — which would be the human family. Would you agree? God wants wholeness for the birds and the bluefish and the beagles, certainly, and He desires pristine perfection for the surging oceans and the ozone layer . . . but most of all, He wanted Adam and Eve to be holy, happy beings. And their descendants. The Apostle Paul picks up on this reality when he writes to the Ephesians:

“For He [God] chose us in Him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in His sight.”

Now, friend, let me share with you a second paragraph from Dr. Tozer’s book, The Knowledge of the Holy, and please keep in mind the heartache of a bride when that Boeing 757 goes down in Pennsylvania. Keep in mind the tears of Princeton Alliance Church and all the friends at Wheaton College who graduated with Todd Beamer and now mourn his loss. Here’s what Tozer writes:

“Since God’s first concern for His universe is its moral health, that is, its holiness, whatever is contrary to this is necessarily under His ETERNAL DISPLEASURE.” Now, that sounds terrible . . . but is it? Maybe it’s actually good news. Tozer continues: “To preserve His creation God must destroy whatever would destroy IT. When He arises to put down iniquity and save the world from irreparable moral collapse, He is said to be angry. Every wrathful judgment in the history of the world has been a HOLY act of PRESERVATION. The holiness of God, the wrath of God, and the health of the creation are inseparably united. God’s wrath is His utter intolerance of whatever degrades and destroys. He hates iniquity as a mother hates the polio” — we could update that to be anthrax — “that takes the life of her child.”

Todd Beamer once loved a little one-year-old boy, “Drewbie,” who liked to play baseball with his daddy. Now terrorists have taken the life of Andrew’s 32-year-old dad. Is God angry? Friend, you bet He is. And His anger is directed toward preserving what was His original blueprint: Lisa and Todd, together, happy, loving each other, and raising these three kids there at Princeton Alliance Church. Preparing their little family to live eternally in God’s kingdom. That’s what Osama bin Laden and his 19 suicide bombers broke up, and the wrathful judgment of God is a holy force, determined to put things right again.

And you know, let’s not be too quick to mail the application of this Bible message off to a cave in Afghanistan. Because you and I, friend, every day of our lives are participants in the destruction of this world by our unholy lives. Every time we sin, every time we behave selfishly, every time we put ourselves before others, we’re endangering the health of God’s creation. That means the person in the next cubicle over. That means your spouse, when you treat them spitefully or hold a grudge or betray them with loose sexual talk or thoughts or actions. That means your world when you thoughtlessly pollute it. That means your own soul when you feed it from the immoral airwaves. And if you’ve been awake enough to sense God’s concern in all these areas — especially for YOU — if you’ve felt a stab of that “eternal displeasure,” then you can actually be glad. That’s right . . . because that shows God is interested enough to exercise a “holy act of preservation” on your behalf. If our Father in heaven cares enough to be sorry about the Beamer family in New Jersey, then it’s good news that He also cares about your family, wherever you are on this Thursday. And that He is reacting, even now, to the sins — even maybe your own sins — that are depriving you of experiencing holy happiness.

It was moving to go to the web site for Princeton Alliance Church there in Plainsboro, New Jersey. When you click on that statement, “We Mourn the Loss of Todd M. Beamer,” it takes you to a statement by his young widow.

“My family and I still wrestle with what has happened,” she writes, “but are comforted by the knowledge that a SOVEREIGN GOD is in control.”

Isn’t that incredible news . . . and incredible faith? Todd is gone, but a sovereign God is in control. The unholy deeds of September 11, 2001 are going to be righted by God because He loves enough to be angry, and He loves enough to move in and preserve and restore. Lisa then quotes I Corinthians 14:33:

“God is not a God of disorder, but of peace.”

It’s good news that where unholiness has caused disorder, God is determined to fix it. Where unholiness has brought war, God will bring peace. Where people’s monstrous deeds — “satanically brilliant” is how Pastor Tim Keller of Redeemer Prebyterian Church in Manhattan described the bombings to Christianity Today — are designed to maim and destroy God’s creation, God will overcome those deeds with holiness and His restoring power and grace.

At the close of her quiet Internet tribute to her late husband, Lisa Beamer says this:

“The words of Genesis 50:20 have continually come to my mind since September 11th: ‘You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives.’ God will use [the Todd M. Beamer Foundation] to continue saving lives.”